Playing the blame game over stars’ deaths
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.
