Brandy is adamant that she will never share the final note her late mentor and “North Star” Whitney Houston gave her before her sudden death in 2012.
The multihyphenate performer, 47, opens up in her new memoir, Phases, which was released on Tuesday, March 31, about the famed note Houston slipped her the day before the “I Will Always Love You” singer’s untimely death at 48.
Brandy and Houston met at the 1995 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. Brandy was a big fan, and she writes in the book that she was so nervous when they were introduced that she screamed and ran in the opposite direction. After that, they began calling each other pretty regularly, and a mentee-mentor bond formed.
“When it comes to the note,” Brandy writes, “I feel the world’s longing to know what Whitney wrote to me. I know that people weave their own stories from my silence. But I hope you can understand — after giving so much of ourselves to the world, I want to keep some small piece of our bond untouched by the world.”
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Before receiving the note in 2012, Brandy was rehearsing with Monica, as the two were gearing up to perform “The Boy Is Mine” at a pre-Grammys gala hosted by legendary music exec Clive Davis.
As the duo were meeting their band for the night and preparing for press interviews, Houston appeared out of nowhere, with damp clothes clinging to her, “evidence of an impulsive swim,” Brandy writes. “She moved with the unpredictable rhythm of someone no longer tethered to the room.”
Brandy recalls Houston calling out to her, “Baby girl! Baby girl!”
“I had to come see my babies! Y’all are gonna kill it,” she continued.
Houston watched as Monica, now 45, and Brandy did a quick run-through of “The Boy Is Mine” while she gave them a thumbs-up in the wings. Houston returned an hour later with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown. They waited as Brandy and Monica finished interviews, with Brandy remembering in her memoir, “Whitney appeared to be under the influence, and it was tough to be in a room crawling with strangers whispering and judging her.” She writes that she felt “Whitney was becoming the story.”
After Brandy and Monica’s interviews were completed, Houston walked over to her Cinderella costar and whispered, “This is for you,” handing her the now-infamous note and planting a kiss on her cheek. Later that night, Brandy called Houston, and she writes about how emotional it was and how she saw “flashes of the old Whitney” in the advice she gave, her laughter and how she returned every topic “back to faith.” She spoke of “getting back in the studio, of redemption waiting just around the corner with Sparkle.”
Of that final conversation with Houston, Brandy writes, “I’m gonna be better,’ she promised as our call wound down, and in that moment, I believed her with every fiber of my being. ‘You’ll see. This is just a season, not the whole story.”
Houston died the next day, February 11, 2012, on Brandy’s 33rd birthday. She accidentally drowned in her hotel bathtub while under the influence of cocaine and other drugs.
The Moesha star writes that she woke up with a “hot, radiating itch” in her throat that morning. She didn’t feel sick, but she still went to the doctor to get checked out. The doctor ruled it was “nothing abnormal” and likely just nerves. When she arrived back to the hotel, she notes it was 3:45 p.m., and a pit developed in her stomach. Brandy’s mother, Sonja Norwood, relayed the news to her about Houston’s death as she was getting ready for the pre-Grammys gala that night.
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“I felt my body go limp, then I fell to the floor, convulsing with sobs,” Brandy writes. “I could faintly make out the sound of my mom on the receiver trying her hardest to soothe me through the phone. My heart didn’t just break; it disintegrated.”
The gala continued as planned that night because “Whitney’s family gave Clive the blessing for the night to proceed,” Brandy notes. She and Monica performed “out of respect for Whitney, who had loved this damn gala so much. And the only thing she’d love more than Clive’s gala was Clive … so we decided to go together. For Whitney.”
She and Monica “clung to each other throughout that nightmarish evening,” Brandy writes. “We made a tear-soaked promise to keep Whitney’s memory alive, to honor her legacy through our own voices, to never let the world forget what real talent coupled with real pain looked like.”
Phases: A Memoir is available for purchase now.
