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Oprah Winfrey is obviously a legendary interviewer who has talked with many of the greats. But, we just learned something new about Oprah’s history with the late Whitney Houston. According to a new revelation from the game-changing TV personality, there was a time when she got an entire audience to keep a secret after the struggling pop star had a faux pas during a performance on her show in 2009.
Whitney Houston died at the age of 48 due to an accidental drowning in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton while she had drugs in her system. The singer behind one of the most iconic movie songs in Hollywood history and a ton of beloved hits struggled with drug addiction for 30 years, and apparently Winfrey and her audience once saw this firsthand. As the talk show host shared:
I had such trust from ‘The Oprah Show’ audience … I think it was [Houston’s] last show with us, and she had gone back on drugs. The first interview I did with her when we’d gone behind stage and I asked her about her intention, she was clean, but the day she came to my show then to perform in front of the audience, she was not, and she fell off of the stage.
Winfrey revealed what happened while receiving the LionHeart Award at The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Tuesday (via Variety). As she continued to say about the memorable interview:
I knew that if that story got out … she would be destroyed by that.
During the in-depth sit down itself on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Whitney Houston spoke to Oprah about her drug addiction by getting honest about the ways in which substance abuse became a coping mechanism for her during her marriage with Bobby Brown. Houston also talked about how her own mother staged an intervention to get her to rehab. The singer ended up going to a 30-day program, but sadly the stint didn’t help reverse her decades of struggles.
While Winfrey says Houston was clean during the initial interview, when she came in to perform on the day of the show's taping with a live audience, she was reportedly under the influence again, and fell in front of everyone. As Winfrey added:
And so even though the audience was there and the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures out because it would ruin her life, and they did not. That would not happen today, I can tell you that.
Looking back, it’s rather impressive that the audience stayed to their word and never let slip the incident. It perhaps speaks to the public's respect for both Oprah Winfrey and Whitney Houston. At the time, Houston was having a comeback moment with her album I Look To You, which ended up being her final record. In May 2011, she went back to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse before dying nine months later.
In 2022, Naomi Ackie portrayed Whitney Houston in the biopic, I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It’s currently available to stream with an Amazon Prime subscription. While The Oprah Winfrey Show may be long over, Winfrey continues to be a greatly decorated interviewer with her own podcast debuting new episodes every week.
