Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped by Houston Cissy

Author:Houston, Cissy [Houston, Cissy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The Bodyguard . . . and Bobby Brown

After Nippy finished her I’m Your Baby Tonight tour, Kevin Costner started calling her. A few months earlier, he had sent her the script of a movie he wanted to make, and ever since, he’d been trying to convince her to star in it with him.

At first, Nippy didn’t want to do The Bodyguard—and Clive Davis didn’t want her to, either. Clive had read the script, about a famous singer named Rachel Marron who falls in love with her bodyguard, and he thought Rachel was a diva. Clive was worried that if Nippy did a good job playing her, people would just assume it was because she was a diva herself.

Kevin kept on pushing, though, because he didn’t want to make the movie with anybody else. Though he didn’t know her, he was convinced she was the one for the role. So when Nippy’s tour came to an end in the fall of 1991, he kept on calling until she finally agreed to do it. The way the agreements were drawn up, Nippy took very little money up front, but she got a great deal on the back end and the soundtrack. Once Clive had a chance to review the music deal, he didn’t waste any time deciding this movie was a pretty good idea after all.

The movie’s producers asked Nippy to fly out to Los Angeles to test with Kevin to see how they looked together on camera. Because Kevin had so many recent hits, movies like Bull Durham and Dances with Wolves, he had a lot of clout in Hollywood, so the role was already Nippy’s, just because Kevin said he wanted her. She went out for a screen test anyway, though, because that was what the studio wanted. And she was anxious. You know, she had never done anything but small TV roles before, little guest spots on shows like Silver Spoons and Gimme a Break. So, as talented as she was, Nippy hadn’t faced a challenge on this scale in a long time. She wasn’t one to let fear keep her from trying something, but this was the kind of big risk that made her second-guess herself. So I did my best to encourage her.

“Just put your mind to it,” I told her. “You can do anything you want to do.” She might not have believed it quite yet, but I did.

When she arrived for the screen test, Kevin could tell she was nervous, so he just told her, “Be yourself. Be natural.” He said that wherever she’d pause in regular conversation, that’s where she should pause in her lines. “Just say it like you’re speaking to a friend,” he told her.

And that’s what she did. In the end, she was so natural onscreen and looked so good with Kevin, the studio couldn’t wait to go. They scheduled shooting to start in the late fall of 1991.

In the meantime, Nippy was still riding high after Welcome Home Heroes and her I’m Your Baby Tonight tour.

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