She was laying unconscious on the bed, completely unresponsive. Having reportedly overdosed on cocaine, Whitney Houston was moments from death. In the hotel room around her lay the signs of drug abuse, including a rolled-up bill and a pipe. Her panicked staff iced her body in the bathtub as a private doctor was summoned in order to keep the incident out of the press. The singer’s life was eventually saved, but her soul would be another story.
This was back in 2000, a year that also saw the singer busted for pot possession at a Hawaiian airport, mysteriously fail to turn up to mentor Clive Davis’ Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and get fired from an Academy Awards gig because of erratic behavior.
Over the next decade, she would attempt to get clean and launch multiple comebacks. Her latest and final one, “Sparkle,” opens Friday, with Houston playing a past-it singer felled by the pressures of the spotlight. At one point, she utters a chilling line: “Was my life not enough of a cautionary tale for you?”
This was supposed to be a movie in which the parallels between the real Houston and her character were more poignant than painful. This was supposed to be a woman pouring all of her traumatic life experience into a role and coming out stronger on the other side to launch a new phase of her career. Instead, the character and that line about a “cautionary tale” will have nothing but tragic echoes after the singer was found dead, facedown in a Beverly Hilton hotel bathtub in February at age 48.
“Sparkle” tells the story of a 1960s girl group made up of three sisters (played by Jordin Sparks, Carmen Ejogo and Tika Sumpter). The trio makes it big but are ultimately torn apart by infighting, drug abuse and tragedy. Houston plays their single mother, Emma.
“Whitney wanted that part of the film portrayed as realistically as possible,” says director, Salim Akil. “She didn’t want it to be glossed over or romanticized, but dealt with in an honest way. She wanted it to affect people.”
Houston helped Ejogo understand her troubled character.
“She was very open with me about her battles. I was quite shocked,” Ejogo says. “She shared some very personal stories. She was willing to be totally vulnerable so I could understand what it was like. She wanted my character to be authentic, and she ‘went there’ in order for me to be able to bring that to the screen.”
“Sparkle” was especially important to Houston because she’d been trying to get the film made for 15 years, having fallen in love with the 1976 original (starring Irene Cara, who went on to appear in “Fame”) as a teenager, seeing it every Saturday for three months straight.
Even back then, the story of a young singer from a humble background who experiences a fall might have seemed prescient to Houston.
She first got involved with music while performing at Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church, where her mother, Cissy, was the music director. (A church in “Sparkle” bears the same name.) Her voice was so powerful that she got recording offers while still in her teens; her parents insisted she finish high school first.
She was ultimately signed in 1983 by Arista after its A&R director saw her perform a single song at a Village nightclub while Houston was backing her mother. She hooked up with famed producer Clive Davis and released a self-titled album in 1985, at age 22. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies, fueled by hits such as “Greatest Love of All,” “How Will I Know” and “Saving All My Love for You.”
Even then, she knew the pitfalls of fame. “I just don’t want drugs to be a part of my life because I know that eventually [they] will ruin you,” she told Ebony in 1986. “Drugs kill you mentally and physically.”
She added that she’d been around artists who used, and that they “didn’t perform well.” But the beginning of her own “Sparkle”-like fall was just around the corner.
Houston was always intensely religious, reading the Bible daily and attending church every other day. On the set of “Sparkle,” one source says Houston banned the cast and crew from using expletives around her.
Throughout the 1980s, the singer was linked to a variety of men, including Eddie Murphy and NFL quarterback Randall Cunningham.She once said that it was a “priority” that men in her life “know the Lord, that [they] love the Lord.” Instead, she fell for a bad boy from the streets who’d had problems with drug abuse, been to jail and once beat up a man at Disney World.
Houston met Bobby Brown at the 1989 Soul Train Awards. Three years later, they married on the diva’s New Jersey estate in front of 800 guests. The garden was decorated with 8,000 roses and hundreds of orchids, all lavender and purple, Houston’s favorite colors.
Although many later blamed Brown for his wife’s spiral into drug abuse, Brown has claimed that Houston was already using when he met her. “She is the crazy one,” he once said.
Houston admitted that her drug use increased after the birth of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, in 1993. She would spend her days watching TV and getting high on joints laced with cocaine. At one point, she stayed inside her Mendham Township, NJ, mansion wearing pajamas for seven months.
Despite her personal troubles, Houston excelled professionally. “The Bodyguard,” which Kevin Costner had personally picked her for because of her voice, was a massive box-office smash in 1992, selling more than $400 million in tickets worldwide. The film’s soundtrack remains the best-selling movie soundtrack of all time.
What the adoring public did not know at the time was that Houston had suffered a miscarriage on set because she was “under so much pressure and such stress.”
Those stresses quickly got worse, and Houston began to spin out of control. In 1994, she arrived two hours late to a White House state dinner. Two years later, she was doing drugs every day. In 2000, she was busted at a Hawaiian airport carrying half an ounce of marijuana. She appeared at a 2001 Michael Jackson tribute concert looking so skeletal that reports of her imminent death emerged.
In an infamous 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, Houston copped to drinking and using drugs, but bristled when asked if she’d smoked crack. “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much for me to ever smoke crack,” the singer said. “Crack is wack.”
Still, rumors of fighting, infidelity and physical abuse swirled around her marriage. The 2005 reality series “Being Bobby Brown” offered a disturbing look into their life. Houston was often shown drinking, smoking and uttering her catchphrase, “Hell to the no.”
The same year, she checked into rehab at Crossroads in Antigua. By 2006, she had divorced Brown. He later claimed that his ex was no saint, and that reality-show Whitney was closer to the real thing than the good-girl image she once had.
Now free of Brown, Houston was determined to mount a comeback. She hired vocal coach Gary Catona to work on her most precious asset: her amazing voice and its three-octave range.
“When I first started working with her in 2005, she had lost 99.9 percent of her voice,” Catona tells The Post. “She could barely speak, let alone sing. Her lifestyle choices had made her almost completely hoarse. As her voice began returning, so did her confidence — she was so happy. If we’d been given the proper amount of time, we would have got her voice back to 95 percent of where she once was.”
Catona never got that chance. “She was not a disciplined person in her personal life, and, away from our sessions, she was under the influence of so many forces. She allowed other people to control her,” he says. “She went out and performed when she was nowhere near ready. I don’t think I can watch ‘Sparkle,’ as seeing her performing below what I know she was capable of is too upsetting.”
“Sparkle” director Akil, however, believes audiences will be “blown away” by her vocals, which sound rougher and an octave deeper than in her heyday. “She performed in the context of her character,” Akil says. “It wasn’t Whitney Houston — it was Emma, who is in pain.”
During filming, the singer, at least outwardly, held it together.
“We didn’t know what to expect when she showed up,” says a set insider. “Some people thought she’d be a train wreck, but she was very into the project and, if she was still into drugs, we saw no signs.”
After filming wrapped in fall 2011, Houston returned to her home in Atlanta. “She had a lot of people in her life who didn’t have her best interests at heart, and when she tried to get clean, they wouldn’t support her,” a friend tells The Post. “Once she was back home in Atlanta, with the same malevolent influences around her, she just wasn’t strong enough to say no.”
Despite completing a stint in rehab in May 2011, the singer was seen behaving strangely in the days leading up to her death, doing cartwheels around her hotel pool and, according to press reports, “looking like she was on something.”
On the afternoon of Feb. 11, her assistant found her dead. The coroner cited accidental drowning as the cause, with contributing factors of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use. The drug was found in the singer’s system, as well as marijuana, Xanax and the muscle relaxant Flexeril.
“She was willing to be the example of what to avoid,” says Ejogo. “She made this film for her daughter and for all girls to recognize the importance of not letting your light be dimmed by anything. To have gone through what she’d gone through, the public humiliation, and still have the guts to share that story is incredibly brave.”
Weeks before her death, Houston confirmed plans to appear in a sequel to the 1995 hit “Waiting To Exhale.” “That Terry McMillan keeps calling me about it,” Houston said. “I guess it’s inevitable. I’m not going to say no.” Sadly, she never got to realize that dream. “Sparkle” is Houston’s last place to shine.
reed.tucker@nypost.com