`Our friendship was intimate on all levels`: Robyn Crawford on her love for Whitney Houston
(The Guardian Culture News)

The star´s former assistant opens up about a 20-year relationship that weathered addiction, fame and secrecyThe story told by Robyn Crawford in the pages of A Song For You, an account of her decades-long relationship with Whitney Houston is tender, moving and painful to read, the history of a friendship that is also a love story. More acutely, it is the story of two women who, for the entirety of Houston´s life, concealed the sexual origins of that relationship, amid intense and often prurient speculation. Meanwhile, Crawford was harangued, marginalised, and allegedly threatened with violence by the singer´s family. `I found comfort in my silence,` says Crawford, whose decision to write the book was in part a rebuke to the tabloidisation of her friend´s legacy. But it´s the silence that lingers. Reading her book, one gets the chilling sense not only of how alien things were in the very recent past, but of a story that shouldn´t be repeated in the future.To break any silence is difficult - never mind one enforced over decades, at the risk of huge commercial damage to a brand as valuable as Houston´s. Even seven years after the singer´s death, Crawford clearly continues to struggle. In her publisher´s New York office, the 55-year-old is softly spoken and elegant, choosing her words with the care of someone still half stuck in the mindset of shielding her friend. Continue reading...