POZitive Attitudes

Macdonald’s multi-faceted portrait of Houston allows us to touch the intertwined forces that did her in. He captures the spiritual division that ran through her youth: how she grew up in the hood of Newark, during the racial tensions of the ’60s, then moved to East Orange, where she was suddenly in integrated middle-class paradise; how her mother, the R&B singer Cissy Houston, shielded Whitney and groomed her, teaching her to sing with perfectionistic rigor, but spent so much time on tour (mostly as a backup singer) that Whitney and her brothers had to stay with a variety pack of neighbors and relatives; how she came from a legacy of amazing singers (not just Cissy but her nieces, Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick), all of whom Whitney echoed in her phrasing; and how the family looked, as one witness puts it, “like ‘The Cosby Show’ of Dodd Street” — but, in fact, her father was a corrupt civil servant and jealous philanderer, who tapped his family’s phone to track his wife’s movements.