‘I used to be Whitney Houston’s bodyguard… But when she laid her head on my shoulder I used to be tempted to surrender all the pieces’: British ex-cop who impressed Kevin Costner’s character within the hit movie reveals simply how shut they have been and his one remorse

The words were carefully composed, as if signifying how deeply meant they were: ‘I will love you always.’

They were written by none other than Whitney Houston – whose most famous song, of course, carried virtually exactly the same title. And the recipient of this heartfelt note? 

The man speaking to me today, former police officer David Roberts, who first became her bodyguard – and then The Bodyguard, the real-life inspiration for Kevin Costner‘s character in the movie for which Houston is most famous.

The softly spoken Welshman, it’s clear, still has strong feelings for the late Houston, who died aged just 48 from an overdose in 2012. He was her main source of protection through what was the most high-profile period of her life, 1988-1995.

While there was no real-life romance between Roberts and Houston he is honest enough to confess in his memoir, Protecting Whitney, which is published next month, that one evening, when she affectionately laid her head on his shoulder, he would have been tempted to ‘give up everything’ to change the role from professional to personal, if he had had the chance.

Yet, as he tells me in this exclusive interview, he was also clear-eyed enough to know the boundaries. 

‘As a close protection officer, I was absolutely focused on keeping her safe. If you cross that line, you lose your objectivity and that makes it dangerous for the person you’re protecting.

‘That was why Frank Farmer [Costner’s character in the film] and Rachel Marron [Houston] couldn’t be together – he crossed the line and that was the end of him in the capacity of what he was employed to do.’

He adds: ‘Much of what was contained in the film, she and I actually lived through. Little details such as the character Rachel Marron holding on to the back of his shirt to escape crowds of fans. That was how we did it.’

Indeed, the name Rachel Marron was also the name Roberts used to book Houston into hotels.

As for the sweet note the pop star sent him, he says that came several years before she would record the song I Will Always Love You. 

‘It was [on] a Post-it note and she [Houston] pushed it under the door of my room at the Regency Hotel in Hong Kong in 1988. I still have it – it’s rather faded with time, but still precious to me,’ he says, speaking to me from his home in Florida.

Emotions aside, Roberts, now aged 73, remains something of a tough guy. He still has a prominent scar on his head after defending Houston during a fight between her brother, Michael, and a gang of racist thugs in Kentucky.

Brought up in Holyhead, Wales, he first worked as a police officer before becoming a sergeant in the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection department of Scotland Yard. 

He also spent time in Northern Ireland, later training as a sniper, and was involved in the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 in London.

Four years later, he started his own private security business. Accustomed to protecting diplomats and CEOs, Roberts wasn’t keen when first asked to be the bodyguard to Houston in 1988. 

The American Embassy in London, who he’d worked for before, approached him to ask if he’d look after the singer, who would be on the British leg of her Moment Of Truth tour.

At the time, Houston was the most famous pop star on the planet – yet Roberts felt the task was frivolous, and that Houston would surely be spoiled and difficult. In the event, he was wrong on both counts.

When he first met the singer at Heathrow, after she had disembarked from her flight on Concorde, he found Houston to be ‘gracious, shy, introverted, well-mannered and one of the most beautiful women I had ever met’.

He quickly realised it would be a momentous challenge to protect the then 23-year-old with the mesmerising three-octave voice from the scores of threats being made against her.

There were many potentially deadly stalkers and ‘crazies’, including several at large in the UK, he recalls.

‘The most worrying seemed to be a man of former military experience based in Wolverhampton who had reportedly planned to take Whitney and their [imagined] children to heaven,’ Roberts says. 

The man was kept under surveillance and failed to make good his threat. Roberts was certainly kept busy by other fanatics, though.

One disturbed aficionado in Australia sent Houston letters, expressing a determination to take the singer to ‘meet his dead mother and they would live forever as a family’.

‘That stalker had bought a ticket for one of Houston’s concerts, but thankfully didn’t try to get to the stage or to contact Whitney afterwards,’ Roberts says.

Eventually, Roberts’s ‘deranged fans list’ grew to 50 names, compiled from people who had written frankly chilling messages to Houston. Some believed they were married to the pop star, others wanted to be married to her.

‘Some women believed they were her twin sister, that they had been separated at birth and this was the time for them to reunite,’ recalls Roberts. 

‘Other women followed themes of hatred, wanting to cause harm, including the removal of body parts.’ Another troubled individual, he remembers, thought Houston had given birth to their son Little Charlie.

He and the police even confronted another violent fan in the mobile home where he lived in Canada where the authorities found illegal firearms, knives, detailed plans of venues and residences, and evidence that he planned to kidnap Mariah Carey, as well as Houston.

A particularly unsavoury incident happened on the 1991 I’m Your Baby Tonight tour when a known stalker was in the audience in New England, US, one evening and was being kept under surveillance.

‘Unfortunately, the chap was able to get in because he had a ticket so no one could stop him, but we were right there and keeping an eye on him when he suddenly stood up, pulled his clothes off and started pleasuring himself and shouting about Lucifer and Satan.

‘He was ejected. Whitney was unaware of what happened because his seat was off to the side of the stage.’ 

As if the situation surrounding Houston’s security wasn’t heightened enough, her marriage to bad boy rapper Bobby Brown in 1992 only exacerbated her followers’ feelings. 

There was an avalanche of angry fan mail from old and newly enraged fans, remembers Roberts.

‘They were mostly men who felt let down, embittered and cheated,’ he remembers, sighing. ‘Many of them wanted to inflict violence on Bobby. The fact that one of them could turn up on the big day couldn’t be ignored.’

But it wasn’t just one fanatic who turned up on Houston’s big day. In the end, 24 would-be trespassers tried to scale the fence of the property where the marriage was held, an astonishing figure showing the intensity around matters of Houston’s safety.

All 24, though, were stopped, Roberts tells me.

‘Whitney did not know the level of threats she was exposed to,’ he says. ‘She had no reason to know. That’s why she employed me. I was there to absorb them and deal with all the threats.

‘It was an ongoing programme of constantly checking where these lunatics with delusions and poisoned minds might be. I had to get it right 100 per cent of the time – some idiot determined to get hold of her only has to be successful once. 

‘I put myself between her and those threats. You want to get to Whitney? Go ahead and try – see what happens.’

Nor was it only deranged fans Roberts had to look out for. Genuine fans were also a threat in their own way.

‘There’s a thin dividing line between harmless fans and fans who might be dangerous, with intentions of carrying out their crazed obsession,’ he says. 

‘If you let any fan, however seemingly innocent, get through your guard, they could turn out to be a killer.

‘The golden rule is never lose sight of your principal and never let anyone get close to her.’

The bodyguard did not have to do all the work himself, however. Roberts chuckles when he recalls how the actor Robert De Niro sent bunches of red roses to the beautiful pop star for months.

‘He was clearly not an individual used to taking no for an answer, but he met his match in Cissy [Houston’s mother]. She called him up and told him to stop making a fool of himself,’ says Roberts.

As well as seeing Houston’s rise to fame, Roberts also witnessed her sad decline as she battled addictions to cocaine and alcohol. These would eventually lead to her being found dead in a hotel bathtub in Beverly Hills 12 years ago.

It’s clear that Roberts is no fan of Houston’s former husband, Bobby Brown – he had long believed their tumultuous marriage would ultimately end disastrously. 

‘There is no doubt in my mind that she and Bobby loved each other but unfortunately, her love was constant while his was variable,’ says Roberts.

One standout incident, he says, happened on September 6, 1993. Tens of thousands of fans eagerly awaited Houston’s arrival at the Fukuoka Dome Stadium in Japan during the second leg of her wildly successful Bodyguard tour.

Little did her audience know of the drama that was unfolding back at the pop star’s hotel as the minutes ticked down to show time, Roberts says today.

Brown – father of the couple’s then six-month-old daughter Bobbi Kristina – had flown in earlier that day from the US and taken his wife to their hotel suite for a passionate reunion.

Just two hours later, however, the rapper, well-known for his womanising ways, nonchalantly announced he had to fly back home immediately.

The normally mild-mannered Houston went ballistic, apparently forgetting that she was due on stage. The couple began shouting and screaming at each other until Roberts intervened.

‘I shouted through the door words to the effect that we are supposed to be professionals, and that the show must go on. It was loud enough for her to hear, and she burst out of the room,’ says Roberts. 

‘She had clearly been crying, and she was angry, but she went and did the show and did it her way.

‘She held the baby [Bobbi Kristina] on stage for the love song she normally sang to her husband and pointedly ignored Bobby, whose apparently urgent business no longer seemed so urgent.

‘He stood at the side of the stage, looking sheepish. And rightly so. She put her foot down in that instance, but then suddenly everything was forgiven and back to normal.’

Although Brown has always denied the marriage ever turned violent, Roberts says Whitney’s behaviour reminded him of women he encountered while working as a police officer. 

‘It reminded me of the domestic abuse cases I’d seen as a police sergeant when women would come in, demanding we arrest their husbands.

‘Then the next day they said they loved them and didn’t want to press charges. She was largely of that ilk.’

Roberts says he wrote his book to express his anger at the people around the woman he still occasionally calls ‘Miss Houston’ who could have prevented the singer becoming gripped by the addictions that led to her death.

‘Her greatest abuse came from the entertainment industry itself,’ he claims. ‘She had obligations to sing, obligations to make people money. Nobody did anything. They could have, and they didn’t because they were motivated by greed.’

He recalls in the book how Houston overdosed in 1995 while on the set of the film Waiting To Exhale. So precarious was her health that he was warned by the singer’s throat doctor she only had about eight months before she would lose her voice entirely.

‘That was when I took a metaphorical bullet for my principal,’ he says, saying he felt obliged to write down his concerns and send a letter to Houston’s lawyers, saying members of the star’s entourage were supplying her with drugs.

A week later, he was fired. He never saw or spoke to Houston again.

‘None of the people surrounding this young lady wanted to confront her drug-taking because she was making too much money for them,’ he says.

It’s apparent he still feels enormous sadness at her death –particularly as Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina also tragically died of a drug overdose in 2015 aged just 22.

Meanwhile, Bobby, now 55, has remarried.

‘It’s been cathartic for me to write all this down because I have been angry since 1995 [the year he stopped working for Houston]. Her voice is lost for all time because so many people who should have cared, didn’t. She needed help, and she didn’t get the help she needed because of greed. It’s that simple.

‘I was hired to protect her life and protected her the best I could. But I couldn’t protect her from herself.’

Protecting Whitney: The Memoir of Her Bodyguard, £26.95, will be published on January 28 by Chicago Press.