Playing the blame game over stars’ deaths

Partners of celebrities such as Whitney Houston are not to blame for addictions, says Suzanne Harrington

IT remains distinctly possible that Whitney Houston would have been found dead in the bath had she never known Bobby Brown — you cannot catch the illness of addiction from another person the way you would a cold — but because her image was always so shiny and wholesome, we prefer to blame it on him.

Otherwise we have to confront the idea that actually, behind the church background and the Motown royalty lineage, behind the power ballads and the power grooming, there was not some innocent young woman being led astray by a fiend, but two adult addicts taking drugs together. When they met in 1989 it was she who was the older, richer, more successful and more influential of the two.

“I didn’t do anything without him,” Whitney said in 2009. “I wasn’t getting high by myself. It was me and him together, and we were partners, and that’s what my high was — him. He and I being together, and whatever we did, we did it together. No matter what, we did it together.”

Would she have taken to drugs with the same gusto had she not met him? Bobby Brown wrote in his autobiography that actually, he had only ever smoked weed before he met Whitney, and that they had got into cocaine together and with equal enthusiasm. But still the idea lingers that had it not been for Brown, Houston would today still be belting out hits with her five octave range instead of being dead at 48. It’s easier and more comfortable for us to blame him.

This dynamic is known as the Karpman Drama Triangle, where there is a victim, a persecutor, and a rescuer. Whitney and Bobby are the victim and persecutor, and we the media-consuming public want to be the rescuer; we want to rescue our image of Whitney, rather than acknowledge that she was instrumental in her own downfall.

We did exactly the same with Amy Winehouse and her husband Blake Fielder Civil. Never mind that from the beginning Amy had always been extreme — extremely talented, extremely destructive, extremely fragile.

We hated Blake, because he caused her suffering, but her suffering gave us Back To Black; what kind of music would she have made had she been happily married in suburbia?

While it is accepted that Blake introduced Amy to Class As, the reality is that she embraced hard drugs with the same eagerness as Whitney. Addicts are born, not made — other people might have made the formal introductions to her substance of choice, but the addiction was her own. Blake certainly didn’t seem like the best choice of partner for a woman as passionate and prone to unhingement as Amy; what remains undisputed is how much the couple were in love, like Whitney and Bobby, albeit with a deadly destructive co-dependency.

Not everyone gets consumed. Kate Moss, a woman who likes a party, was not swallowed up by her relationship with the so-called Pied Piper of Heroin, Pete Doherty — unlike Whitney and Amy, she was not hooked on drugs and was able to walk away. Although Doherty tried to clean up, even Kate Moss couldn’t compete with his addiction. After she was shown in the tabloids using drugs, her career bounced back very quickly, while poor old Pete slid into befuddled obscurity.

Paula Yates is a particularly tragic case in that she never drank or used drugs during her years with Bob Geldof — she used to advertise non-alcoholic wine, and eschewed late nights, her focus entirely on her children and her work. But when Michael Hutchence introduced her to drugs, of which he was exceedingly fond, she quickly played catch-up. When he killed himself (the coroner reported suicide from depression), Yates was left devastated; she had lost custody of her three children with Geldof, and then lost the love of her life. Yet her death was reported as an accidental overdose; she had wanted to numb the pain, but overdid it.

So would Paula Yates still be alive had she not met Michael Hutchence? While she seems the most cut-and-dried example of the Karpman dynamic — the clean living mummy corrupted by the hedonistic rock star — the dynamic is actually reversible. While Paula’s demise was blamed squarely on Hutchence, Hutchence’s family in Australia blamed Yates for his. (Kylie was said to have had a lucky escape from his influence, but her relationship with Hutchence elevated her image from teen poppet to adult Kylie, effectively relaunching her career).

Perhaps the most misrepresented of all are the long dead punks Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. We read about how he was charged with her murder in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, after she was found dead from a stab wound in 1978. He insisted her death was accidental, but died himself four months later of an accidental overdose, aged just 21. He was reported as the murderer; she was the victim. Except she was nothing of the kind.

A 1983 book by Nancy’s mother Deborah Spungen, titled And I Don’t Want To Live This Life (a line from a love poem Sid wrote to Nancy after her death) shows how devoted Sid was to her daughter; how Nancy had always had a death wish, always been destructive and disturbed. Sid had been an uncouth bumbling youth before he met Nancy; already addicted herself, she introduced him to heroin. But in all of these stories, there really are no bad guys, just bad chemistry — put two addicts together, add drugs and romantic love, and you have a human bomb. Whitney is the latest to blow.