The star’s former assistant opens up about a 20-year relationship that weathered addiction, fame and secrecy
The story told by Robyn Crawford in the pages of A Song For You, an account of her decades-long relationship with Whitney Houston is tender, moving and painful to read, the history of a friendship that is also a love story. More acutely, it is the story of two women who, for the entirety of Houston’s life, concealed the sexual origins of that relationship, amid intense and often prurient speculation. Meanwhile, Crawford was harangued, marginalised, and allegedly threatened with violence by the singer’s family. “I found comfort in my silence,” says Crawford, whose decision to write the book was in part a rebuke to the tabloidisation of her friend’s legacy. But it’s the silence that lingers. Reading her book, one gets the chilling sense not only of how alien things were in the very recent past, but of a story that shouldn’t be repeated in the future.
To break any silence is difficult – never mind one enforced over decades, at the risk of huge commercial damage to a brand as valuable as Houston’s. Even seven years after the singer’s death, Crawford clearly continues to struggle. In her publisher’s
New York office, the 55-year-old is softly spoken and elegant, choosing her words with the care of someone still half stuck in the mindset of shielding her friend.