Whitney & Bobbi Kristina by Ian Halperin

Author:Ian Halperin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

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Whitney had not given up her ambitions to appear on the big screen and had let her management team know that this was one of her top priorities as the new decade got under way. The stories about how she came to appear in The Bodyguard have nearly as many versions as the origin of her romance with Bobby Brown.

One story has it that Kevin Costner had first approached Whitney about appearing in his film as far back as 1989 but that she was initially reluctant.

It’s the version she would tell Entertainment Weekly in 1993.

“I kept saying to him, ‘What makes you think I can do this?’ And he used to say to me—she launches into a playful imitation of Costner’s flat Southern California drone—‘Whitney, listen. Every once in a blue moon you get this person who just comes around and has this quaaality. When you thought about a movie that had music in it, you used to think about Barbra or Diana. But now it’s you.’ And I’m like, “That’s what I want. I want it to be meeee!’ ”

To another interviewer, she claimed that Costner began wooing her for the part in early 1990, and when her agent confirmed she was up for the part, she was flabbergasted. “My God,” she would tell her biographer Jeffery Bowman. “Can you imagine this! Kevin Costner calls me up out of the clear blue sky and asks me to be in a movie with him. Who would believe this?”

The idea for the film itself was making the rounds in Hollywood as far back as the seventies, when it was first envisioned as a starring vehicle for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen. But it reportedly fell through at the time when McQueen was unhappy that he would be overshadowed by Ross. A few years later, the idea was resurrected but with Ryan O’Neal as the lead male character and Ross as his love interest.

The writer, Lawrence Kasdan, had shopped his screenplay around Hollywood for a decade with no success before he finally interested Costner, who saw himself in the lead role as a white bodyguard who fell for his black protectee.

Meanwhile, poor record sales for Whitney’s third album weren’t the only signs of a career lull. Whitney had kicked off her 1991 tour with a concert to capitalize on the patriotic frenzy sparked by the Gulf War. It was originally scheduled as an HBO special, with Whitney singing for the troops on Easter Sunday. But by the time of the scheduled concert, the war was over and instead it was billed as a “Welcome Home, Heroes” concert, with Whitney performing in a Virginia naval hangar to welcome home military personnel returning from Iraq.

In August 1991, the New York Times reported that she was playing to less than capacity crowds on her US tour. And, although the recession may have played a part in the poor sales, critics had noted that her performances left a lot to be desired.

“Onstage, Ms. Houston was

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