PRIVATE FUNERAL FOR WHITNEY

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Newark Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Jr. presents singer Whitney Houston with the key to the city at a press conference held at City Hall in this 1986 file photo. (Steve Andrascik/The Star-Ledger)
Whitney Houston memories from The Star-Ledger gallery (24 photos)

NEWARK — Grammy Award winner and longtime family friend Marvin Winans will deliver the eulogy for Whitney Houston during her funeral Saturday at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, the church pastor said Tuesday night.
Houston’s family rejected a public spectacle for a final farewell to the pop icon, choosing instead to hold a private, invitation-only funeral at New Hope, the singer’s childhood church, which seats about 1,500. The Rev. Joe A. Carter, pastor at New Hope Baptist Church, said he will officiate the service, which is scheduled to begin at noon. Houston was born in Newark and raised in East Orange.
Winans, who also serves as the lead pastor at Detroit’s Perfecting Church, told the Detroit Free Press that Houston was like a sister to him, and it felt like he had lost a sibling when he learned the 48-year-old singer had died Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Houston’s mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, her cousin, Dionne Warwick, and other family members gathered at Whigham Funeral Home in Newark well into the early morning hours Tuesday to shape plans for the service, funeral director Carolyn Whigham said.

Video: Owner of funeral home explains to media the plan for Whitney Houston funeral
Carolyn Whigham, owner of Whigham Funeral Home in Newark, explains to the media on Tuesday afternoon that Whitney Houston’s funeral will be held on Saturday at noon at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark. She also talked about knowing the family and their loss. (Video by Noah K. Murray/The Star-Ledger)
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Although a local community leader with ties to the family told The Star-Ledger Monday that there would be a public wake and funeral at the Prudential Center on Thursday and Friday, the Houston family never confirmed it, Carter said.
“We view it as nothing more than a rumor,” he said.
The family has been split over where to bury Houston, with Cissy Houston and Warwick lobbying for Atlanta, where they believe Houston was happiest, the website TMZ reported.
However, two people familiar with the family’s plans told The Star-Ledger Tuesday night family is considering burying her in a Westfield cemetery at least one day after the funeral. The people asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly for the family.
Meanwhile, Newark police have begun making plans for Saturday’s service, which is expected to draw thousands of fans and a crush of media.

Michael Nash, of Newark, leaves flowers at a make-shift memorial outside the New Hope Baptist Church following an early morning prayer service in honor of Whitney Houston, who died Saturday at age 48.

“Obviously Whitney Houston was one of the greatest performers of our time, and certainly we expect a huge presence of other performers, actors and we’re preparing for all that,” Police Director Samuel DeMaio said Tuesday.
DeMaio said police have begun closing streets near the church and that officials are working on a security plan for the funeral, which is expected to draw some of the biggest names in the music industry.
He also raised the possibility of erecting a video monitor outside the church to accommodate fans and residents not invited in.
Outside the funeral home on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Tuesday, Whigham, who has known the family for decades, urged the dozens of reporters — some from as far away as Brazil and Russia — to let the family mourn in private.
“A mother has lost her child,” Whigham said. “It’s not planned that way.”
But fans, who waited outside the funeral home late Monday night to watch a gold hearse return New Jersey’s pop princess to her hometown and who continued to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial outside the church Tuesday, mourned their missed chance to say farewell.

Houston school principal calls Whitney Houston a role model
Henry Hamilton, principal of the Whitney E. Houston Academy of Creative and Performing Arts in East Orange calls Houston a role model for his students. Houston attended the school when it was called the Franklin School, the school was later renamed to honor Houston.
“The public should have an opportunity to give a last goodbye to one of the city’s most beloved daughters,” said Calvin Taylor of Newark, who skipped work Tuesday to spend time outside the funeral home. “She touched so many people, I think it’s terrible. She’s got a lot of love here.”
Sharon Bailey of Irvington was upset that no public memorial has been planned.
“They should have one. She’s the queen of pop,” she said. “Her death feels like a loss in my family.”
Jethro Townes, a Newark native whose son, Hassim Drinkard, is a distant cousin of Warwick’s, drove to Newark from Harrisburg, Pa., with his wife to visit the church memorial. Fans have left stuffed animals and signed their names to large goodbye posters hung on the church’s balloon-festooned fence near the corner of Sussex Avenue and Dey Street.

Townes said he hadn’t seen Houston in years, but said the family was not worried that she had relapsed into drug use in recent months, despite reports painkillers were found in the hotel room where Houston died: “I think she had overcome her obstacles in life.
“God allows a time for people to leave his earth,” Townes said, recalling the recent death of Etta James and the loss of Michael Jackson in 2009. “But if you look at what has happened over the past few years, God has a great choir now.”
Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room Saturday night, hours before she was to perform at mentor Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammy Awards party. Though a cause of death has not been released, law enforcement sources have told various media outlets Houston, who struggled with drug addiction in the past, died from mixing alcohol with prescription drugs.
At least one of Houston’s friends is starting to point fingers over the singer’s untimely death.

Fans pay homage outside Whitney Houston’s childhood church in Newark
A gathering of fans, local and out-of-state, adorn the fencing of the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark with flowers and memorials to the late pop icon, Whitney Houston. It was announced that the funeral for Houston will be held on Saturday at twelve none by invitation only
“I stand on, whoever flew her out to perform at that party, should have provided someone to be there,” Chaka Khan told CNN’s Piers Morgan. “To somehow, keep the riff-raff out of the situation. To keep the dangerous people away.
“I mean, I’ve cried for her, a lot over the years, so many times,” Khan continued. “In a way I’ve mourned her, because I felt something was gonna happen because she was so close to the wire.”
Calling Houston’s accomplishments “a great source of pride for the people of the state,” Gov. Chris Christie will order all state buildings to fly flags at half-staff on Saturday. Christie routinely orders flags lowered to honor fallen New Jersey soldiers, but he also asked that flags be lowered when E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons died from a stroke last year.
By Barry Carter and James Queally/The Star-Ledger
Staff writers Richard Khavkine, Janelle Griffith, Vicki Hyman, Julia Terruso and Tom Wright-Piersanti contributed to this report.
Bobby Brown is “extremely disappointed” that several of Whitney Houston’s family members do not want him to attend her funeral, reports TMZ.

SEE ALSO: Did We Do Enough For Whitney?

Family members have allegedly told Brown to stay away from Houston’s funeral because they are not fond of him.

TMZ is quick to clarify that there has been no “official” word.

Brown is hoping to attend the funeral so that he can support his daughter Bobbi Kristina, 19, who was rushed to the hospital twice in the hours and days following her mother’s death at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2011. Allegedly the teen was struggling with depression and anxiety.

Brown and Houston were married for 14 years. It ended in 2007 just as tumultuously at it began, with both stars still struggling with drug abuse and their shared history of domestic violence. Though fans of Houst0n are quick to point the finger at Brown for her downward spiral, in his 2008 biography, The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But …. he made it clear that Whitney was far more in control than most people believed:

I mean, I’m guilty of getting upset and flying off the handle a little,” Brown said of the alleged domestic abuse incident for which he was arrested in 2003. “I was known to throw a bottle or two at a wall or something. Things that I’d regret, I would be responsible for cleaning up or having the wall repaired. What people fail to realize is that Whitney is no punk. She definitely knows how to handle and defend herself in situations that could have potentially been violent. Some of the stories in the media made me out to be like Ike Turner, when that wasn’t my character.”
And their famed co-dependent drug abuse?

I never used cocaine until after I met Whitney. Before then, I had experimented with other drugs, but marijuana was my drug of choice.”
Whitney seemed to confirm Bobby’s spin on their relationship in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview:

When you love, you love. I mean, do you stop loving somebody because you have different images? You know, Bobby and I basically come from the same place. You see somebody, and you deal with their image, that’s their image. It’s part of them, it’s not the whole picture. I am not always in a sequined gown. I am nobody’s angel. I can get down and dirty. I can get raunchy.”
Even with their bittersweet, unhealthy history, when Brown received word of Houston’s death while on tour with New Edition in Southhaven, Mississippi, he gave his ex-wife a spontaneous tribute before allegedly lapsing in and out of “uncontrollable crying fits”:

First of all, I want to tell you that I love you all. Second, I would like to say, I love you Whitney. The hardest thing for me to do is to come on this stage.”
Hopefully, an amicable resolution will be reached, at least for Bobbi Kristina’s sake.