“It’s Whitney’s world,” says someone who has some experience in her orbit. “We just wait in it.”
Whitney Houston has earned the reputation of someone who has little concern for other people’s schedules. This, after all, is a woman who made her Whitney-dependent record company, Arista, wait six long years for an album of new, non-soundtrack songs. But there is, of course, compensation because her intervening soundtrack albums for “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale” were huge. Denzel Washington says he had to badger Houston for more than a year before she agreed to co-star with him in “The Preacher’s Wife,” his updated remake of the “The Bishop’s Wife.”
Washington’s compensation is that Houston is in the film. “She was the only person to play this part,” Washington says of Houston’s character, Julia, the beleaguered wife of an inner-city preacher who develops a crush on the angel (Washington) God sends to Earth to help the preacher out. But even though the part she plays — a choir director with a voice that can shake the rafters and send shivers up the spines of the saints — was tailor-made for Houston, she still expressed concern.
“I didn’t know if I would be believable wearing such dowdy clothes,” says Houston, who is impeccably dressed in a deep blue, hip-hugging zippered suit that provides absolutely no evidence she is three months pregnant with her second child. “I kept asking Penny (director Marshall) if she couldn’t have a little more style, wear some nicer things, and she said, `Whitney, this is a woman who doesn’t have that kind of money, and if she did, she’d spend it on something else.’ I understand that because I grew up in the projects, and if my mother did get a nice dress, she’d just give it to someone who needed it more. But I didn’t have to like it.”
Houston has kept her interviewer waiting only an hour, some of which he has spent chatting amiably with the two bodyguards who keep a watchful eye on her hotel suite. (Neither looks much like Kevin Costner.) The interviewer’s compensation is that Houston is friendly and forthcoming, talking easily about her growing confidence as an actress(“I thought this movie turned out good, and I thought Whitney was pretty good”), her growing reputation as a temperamental diva (“I usually know what I want, but I never tell anyone how to do their job unless I’m sure I know how to do it myself better”) and even her relationship with husband, singer Bobby Brown, whom she describes variously as “wise,” “wild” and “wonderful.”
“I’m faithful and loyal,” says Houston, responding to all the unasked-for advice she regularly receives urging her to show the often-arrested, party-down Brown the door and get on with her life. “My mother was loyal, my grandmother was loyal, and I believe that’s the right way to live. Besides, people who talk about Bobby only know what he’s like when he’s hanging with his buddies and getting loose. I know Bobby the man, and I know Bobby the boy, and I like them both.”
Part of Houston’s reluctance to take on the role of Julia in “The Preacher’s Wife,” she says, was born of her fear that she was personally too far removed from a character who would fall in love with a preacher.
“I never did go for boys like that,” says Whitney. “I always was more interested in the boys who were. . .”
A little bad?
“Sometimes more than a little,” she says, unleashing a knowing laugh.
But Houston says when she looked more closely at Julia, she was able to see that in “her respect for the church, her love for her child, her respect for her marriage, we had a lot in common. I mean, when she meets Denzel, she could say `enough of this’ and let what she has go. But Julia’s true.”
There was also that funky gospel choir, which afforded her, she says, a chance to “get back to where I came from.” Houston grew up singing in the Newark, N.J., church choir led by her aunt, Thelma, and her mother, Cissy, whose trio, The Sweet Inspirations, supplied the soulful spirit for dozens of recordings by secular artists from Elvis to Aretha.
“We were the choir in Newark. And my mother and aunt together were dynamite. They were great gospel singers. That was the easiest part of doing the movie and the most enjoyable because it took me back. It’s like I never left.”
Houston did leave, of course, and according to documented stories and scurrilous rumors that paint her as a demanding diva who doesn’t go to the refrigerator for cold chicken without an entourage of door openers, official tasters and Saran Wrap-handlers, she left polluted Newark to breathe the more rarefied air of the courted and pampered. Houston says she hardly pays attention to such talk.
And Houston says she has never tried to overrule a director or a cinematographer or “anyone who has expertise in their job. I’m not that kind of freak. But when you give me a job to do in my department, you have to trust that I know how to work it. If you don’t know anything about it, then do what you do best. That’s all.
“I mean, if Penny Marshall tried to tell me something about the singing in this movie, I might tell her, `No, I can’t do that because it doesn’t work.’ But if I did something in the acting she said didn’t work, I accepted that.”
Houston says “the last thing in the world I wanted to be was an actress,” and her critics would claim that she is not yet in any danger. But Houston is a bona fide movie star, and the receipts for “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale,” prove it.
With her second child on the way (her daughter is 3) and a husband “who would like to keep me pregnant all the time,” Houston says she has thought little of what to do next. She has a stack of scripts from which to choose, and Arista would love to get her back into the studio with her hit-making collaborator, the producer Babyface, whom she refers to as “Face.” She allows that her own production company is developing a couple of things for her, but she thinks it might be interesting to produce a movie in which she does not appear.
And though she thinks “The Preacher’s Wife” has the potential to be “the most important film of decade” because it depicts black men and women as something other than “junkies and killers,” she also says she would love to be in one of those “funky movies where I could be bad.”
“I was making a video with the director of “Set It Off” and I asked why he didn’t think of me for that movie because I would have loved to have been shooting up those banks. He was like: `Ohhh, noooo! You would?’ He didn’t think nice Whitney would want to be involved with something like that, but I would. I mean, I love `Superfly,’ you know? You have to be careful what you assume.”
