Every Little Step: My Story (11 page)

Their relationship was beautiful. We were really young guys in the entertainment business, but I think he saw it was time to settle down, time to start growing up.

One night quite some time later I was backstage at Philips Arena in Atlanta at a Beyoncé concert. We went backstage to see Bey, so we were sitting there talking to Jay Z, waiting for her after the show. Just then Whitney walked up. She had on a Kangol hat and a full-length chinchilla fur coat. This was when she and Bobby were going through some difficulties in their marriage, with a lot of crazy stuff being written about them.

“I got your brother,” she said to me. “I got him.”

I looked her in the eyes. She was dead serious. I put my hands up.

“All right,” I said. “I’m gonna take it just like that, sis.”

With all the stuff that was going on, she wanted me to know that she loved that man and she had his back.

The world needs to understand that Bobby’s been victimized. He really took it on the chin. He
has
been Mr. Bad Boy; he basked in that for a second, walked in it for a second. But the real Bobby was totally the opposite of the guy they’d been talking about. That’s why when you see him with his kids, they
love
him. His kids are just crazy about their daddy. That’s the real character of a person, how your children feel about you. That’s who you really are. That’s why somebody like Whitney could fall in love with him.

I attended one of her concerts and afterward she introduced me to her family. She just said, “This is Bobby Brown.” She didn’t call me “boyfriend” or give me any label, but I could tell the family knew what was going on. If she hadn’t told them already, they would have known just by the way she was smiling and acting. They were warm toward me, particularly her brothers, Michael and Gary, and her father, John Houston. I grew to be very close to her dad and talked to him regularly up until his death in February 2003. We would talk a lot about her business. I would assure him that I was watching her money closely. Even at the very end, after he had gotten sick, after all her albums, he was still asking me about it. I think the family members saw how
well I treated her, how much I obviously loved her, so they were supportive of us.

I was courting her in a big way by this time. I’ve always considered myself a romantic fellow, so I was constantly thinking of romantic gestures that I knew would please her. Whitney and I would compete to see who could buy the most extravagant gifts. She started it off by buying me this gorgeous watch. It was platinum and gold and made by Fred, an extremely exclusive jewelry and watchmaking company based in Paris founded by Fred Samuel. Fred’s watch prices easily exceeded $10,000. This watch was breathtaking.

So I replied by having a fabulous bracelet made for her. I had a guy in LA we called “Joe the Jeweler” and he was the baddest jeweler in the country. As a matter of fact, I still use him to this day. He made amazing pieces for Whitney—they just blew her away.

The early days of our romance were like a fairy tale. We both liked the same things, so it was so easy for us to have a great time together. We would meet up in different countries, since we were both constantly on the road. We were desperate for our privacy, so there were a lot of intimate dinners in the corners of fancy restaurants, a lot of days and nights in ritzy hotels. Of course, there was a lot of time spent together in bed, where we enjoyed our wonderful sexual chemistry. We would gamble, play cards. We would sit and play spades for hours, yelling at each other and talking a lot of shit, which all the best spades players know you
have
to do. Whitney was
from Newark and East Orange—she always knew how to talk a gang of shit.

When word did go public that we were dating, I tried to pay no attention to the gossip columns. I tried very hard. But I would look at the stuff in the rag mags, the horrible things they were saying about us. About me. The nastiness of that period is why I don’t read any of that stuff today. ’Cause the nastiness can hit your heart. Sometimes it takes a long time to come back from what people think and say about you.

Whitney was really good at turning the other cheek, but not me. If they were saying something about me that was a lie—and it almost always was—then I’d want to fight. I’d want to bust somebody’s ass. I’d want to find out who wrote it, find out where they got their information from. That’s just me. I have to have truth around me. I don’t like dishonesty. If you’re going to say something about me, please say it to my face—so I can straighten you out. That’s the Orchard Park projects right there.

At first the media were mainly focused on how old Whitney was and how young I was. And that I was the bad boy and she was this goody two-shoes. That one was so wrong because we were definitely compatible in every way. We were two young, rich kids who found each other and were falling in love. But I guess the world couldn’t accept that.

Whitney was acutely aware of her image because that’s how she made her money. She was always neat about ev
erything she did—the way she dressed, her hair, her skin. Whenever she got ready for anything she always had to look picture-perfect. I was the same way—I always wanted to look my best. We would have designers make clothes for us that sort of matched, so that when we walked in the room everyone would know we were a unit.

During the first year or so of our courtship, we started talking about marriage, but in a general way—not necessarily getting married to each other. We acknowledged how hard it was in our industry to find someone you would want to be with for the rest of your life. We loved Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and what they represented, having stayed together and apparently in love for decades, despite being in an industry that chewed up married couples and spit them out. We would get a thrill out of seeing them together in movies and then together in real life, how they carried themselves, how they treated each other. We really admired them. That’s how we looked at ourselves. We had a chance to meet them several times and they would also tell us they loved how we were together. The admiration was mutual.

As I thought about our bond and my love for her, I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her by my side. It was time to ask her to marry me. When I decided to propose, I went and had a conversation with her father. I wanted to do it old-school, like a perfect gentleman. I met with him in New York City and I told him my plans.

What he said at first kind of threw me.

“You sure she wants to marry you?” he asked me, looking a little surprised.

I was thinking,
Damn, why wouldn’t she—what the fuck is the matter with me?

He looked at me closely. “I don’t trust you,” he said. “How much money you making?”

I happened to have a bank stub with me showing my account balance that day. That particular account had several million dollars in it. He looked down at the stub and nodded his head. “All right. You can be with my daughter because you don’t need nothing from her,” he said.

Then he kind of shrugged and said, “All right, if she wants to marry you. If y’all in love.”

Then he paused and added one more thing.

“Just treat my baby right,” he said.

I nodded my head and told him I would.

I didn’t plan anything elaborate for the proposal—but I did have one trick up my sleeve. I went to my jeweler and told him I was about to propose to Whitney Houston, so we had to come up with something special. He had these twenty-carat diamonds that were two of the cleanest cut stones in the world. One had a little yellow to it; the other was incredibly clean. I bought both of them for $250,000 each. I had him make the clean one into a beautiful ring. I put the other one in a safe. Then I got the idea to also get another ring, one that was still very nice but not nearly as impressive. It was just six carats. I think he actually gave it
to me for free, after I had already spent a half mil on the other two.

Whitney was in Miami, so I flew there to meet her. She picked me up at the airport; we were riding together in the backseat of the limo, snuggling close, glad to see each other. It was the middle of the day in April, so it was bright and sunny outside.

I pulled the box out of my pocket and handed it to her. I saw her eyes starting to widen. As I said, we had been giving each other incredibly extravagant gifts for years, so this wasn’t the first time I had handed her a jewelry box. But it
was
the first time I mouthed these words:

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes!” she said. She started crying as she opened the box. It was the smaller, six-carat ring. She held it and admired it as she sobbed.

I had the twenty-carat monster on my finger.

“Are you sure?” I said. I presented her with the real ring and she went nuts. It looked like a big lovely crystal ball on her finger, like you could look into that thing and see the future.

“No, you didn’t!” she said, hitting me. “Why would you fuck with me like that!”

It would have been even funnier if the first ring had been a puny little thing, but I couldn’t do that to her. That would have been too mean.

I was excited as hell about the idea of spending my life
with this lovely, incredibly talented goddess. Of course I knew there would be a lot of backlash. We had already gotten a significant taste of that. But I think I still believed that most people, when they saw how in love we were, how good we were for each other, how much fun we had together, would come around and support our union in the end. We wanted to be together. So we dated, we fell in love and now we were to get married. What could be wrong with that? After all, that was the proper order of things, right?

Oh my God, wrong. Dead fucking wrong. From the moment we announced to the world that we were going to get married, we became the target of a media and public campaign that had the single goal of tearing us apart. Were we really the only ones in the world who wanted our marriage to succeed? Sometimes that’s exactly how it felt. But we decided that we weren’t going to let the negativity get to us. We wouldn’t give the outside world the satisfaction. They didn’t know anything about us, how close we were, how perfect we were together.

We would show the world that we were stronger than the bullshit.

In the months leading up to our wedding, Whitney was occupied with the filming of
The Bodyguard
with Kevin Costner. She was extremely nervous about making her acting debut in such a big role, opposite one of the biggest movie stars in the world. I was nervous too, but for a different reason—I didn’t trust her playing the love interest of Costner. I
wasn’t that familiar with how movies were made and what went on behind the scenes of a movie set, which heightened my suspicions even more. I saw the script and knew it contained some love scenes. I knew how smooth Costner was—hell, even my mother was in love with him. So I told her I needed to be on the set too. But Whitney wasn’t going for that—she told me my presence on the set would make her uncomfortable and she couldn’t have that.

I was also concerned for another reason—Whitney was pregnant. Or so I was told. So I was concerned that she would be putting herself in such a stressful situation. I had already told her about Kim’s being pregnant with another child, so I was worried that our relationship was on shaky ground at the time. I love my son Bobby Jr. more than I thought possible, but I was still upset with myself for getting drunk and having sex with Kim while Whitney and I were together, resulting nine months later in the birth of Bobby Jr. I was beating myself up over this misstep—and Whitney wasn’t letting me forget it either. So when she told me she was pregnant as well, I saw it as a chance for me to make amends.

One day when I was out on tour, I got word that Whitney had suffered a miscarriage on the set of
The Bodyguard
. I immediately jumped on a plane to go spend time with her on the set. As soon as I arrived, I started to get suspicious. I’m no medical doctor, but she was not acting like a woman who was in the throes of mourning a lost baby. As a matter of fact she was back to filming just a couple of days after it had
happened. I never saw any evidence of her pregnancy or her miscarriage, so I started to think that the entire story was a ruse created by her PR team. When I confronted her about it, she was insistent.

“Bobby! Yes, I was pregnant!” she said.

But I didn’t believe her. To this day, I believe her pregnancy was a story that was concocted by her people to explain to the public why she would marry Bobby Brown. In other words, if you’re confused about why she would get with the “bad boy,” here’s an explanation for you: knocked up. After all, that’s what bad boys do—wander the countryside knocking up innocent women. She was supposedly several months into the pregnancy, yet I never saw any hint of a belly. As slim as Whitney was, a belly would have been visible right away—as was the case when she finally did get pregnant with Bobbi Kristina months later, right before our wedding.

Once the film wrapped, Whitney dove into the wedding planning with gusto. The plan was to have the wedding at her New Jersey mansion in July, so that gave her just three months to do the planning. But when money is no object, you can do anything in three months. She wanted it to be just right, to have the best of everything. I stayed out of the planning completely.