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PIERS MORGAN: The best tribute Whitney and Bobbi Kristina's greedy, grasping, fame-hungry relatives and friends could pay them is to shut the f*** up
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PIERS MORGAN: The best tribute Whitney and Bobbi Kristina's greedy, grasping, fame-hungry relatives and friends could pay them is to shut the f*** up

Published: 15:45 EST, 3 August 2015 | Updated: 01:35 EST, 4 August 2015

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Three years ago, late on a Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in my Los Angeles house when a whole phalanx of news media helicopters started buzzing around the skies over the nearby Beverly Hilton Hotel.

As I pondered what on earth had provoked all this attention, a text message from my then CNN producer flashed into my phone: ‘Whitney Houston’s dead.’

I raced straight to the network’s bureau in West Hollywood, and ended up co-anchoring four hours of rolling news coverage of this shocking and extremely sad news.

A week later, I was outside a Baptist church in New Jersey, covering Whitney’s funeral.

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Whitney Houston's death was a shock, but it rapidly became a family-driven madness. The late singer is seen above with daughter Bobbi in 2011. Bobbi's 'brother' turned boyfriend Nick Gordon is lurking back left

The week after Whitney Houston died, with her funeral, pictured here was a tumultuous and unedifying week, full of mourning, acrimony, tears and tantrums. It all struck me then as just one desperately sad circus

It was a tumultuous, unedifying week, full of mourning, acrimony, tears and tantrums.

We watched family members bitterly accusing each other of all manner of nefarious activity; friends, and pretend friends, of the late singer trading insults over who knew her best.

It all struck me then as just one desperately sad circus.

A perfect embodiment of what so many superstar lives sadly become – a soulless, greed-infested shark pool of self-interested groupies, hangers-on and ruthless relatives.

Whitney was eaten up and killed by the disease of fame.

She may have died in a bath after a drug-and-alcohol binge.

But it was fame that finished her. Just as it finished Elvis, Michael Jackson, and for very different reasons, John Lennon.

All Whitney’s problems could be traced back to the moment she was catapulted onto the world entertainment stage with a voice that I still believe is the greatest of all female singers.

Fame is an all-corroding illness.

It changes people, and those around them. For the worse, rarely the better.

It wrecks relationships - sexual, platonic and familial.

It turns money, the vast oceans of cash that pour into a superstar’s bank account, into an evil god worshipped by a multitude of sinners.

It creates paranoia, tension, addiction and a craven, desperate desire for escapism through those cliché-d prisms of pills, drugs and booze.

And ultimately, it’s just so fake.

Whitney Houston's downfall was her fame, brought on by an incredible voice and the luck to be born in America where that voice made her millions. Bobbi was also brought down by fame, but all she was famous for was her parents, seen here on stage with her in 1993

'I miss her like hell': Bobbi Kristina's tribute to Whitney

There’s really nothing special about anyone just because they’re ‘famous’.

Particularly now, in a modern world where literally anyone, anywhere, can be a ‘celebrity’ – for killing their wife, falling off a cliff, belching on YouTube or just looking notably fat or stupid.

Andy Warhol’s warning of the 15-minutes-of-fame society is upon us.

We’re all gripped in its self-absorbed vanity, recording every second of our often tedious little lives (and yes, I include myself in this charge..) on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat for the often very unimpressed delectation of others.

Whitney Houston could sing magnificently, but there are probably a hundred singers right now in the sprawling poverty-strewn townships of Soweto in South Africa who can sing as well as she did. We’ll just never know them.

And they, ironically, are the lucky ones.

They didn’t get cursed with the blight of fame.

When I visited those townships a few years ago for a documentary about Nelson Mandela, the millions of people crammed into those miles of mudhuts and tents had no money or celebrity status, nor cell phones to record every second of their lives - but they sang, they danced, they smiled and they looked like they hadn’t a care in the damn world.

On Monday Bobbi was also driven in a gaudy golden hearse to a New Jersey funeral home, just as her mother was three and half years earlier

Whitney's daughter was laid to rest next to her mother in a New Jersey cemetery in a very similar scene

Police escort golden hearse carrying Bobbi Kristina's body

I thought of them today when I saw the gawdy gold funeral hearse for Whitney’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown taken by police escort to the same New Jersey funeral home and burial ground that Whitney herself had been taken and laid to rest.

There were the same crowds, same banners, same cops, same paparazzi, same TV networks. All in their own way feeding off it like eager vultures dive-bombing a dead gazelle’s carcass.

It was almost identical to the farcical furore that surrounded Whitney’s death, yet even sadder.

Bobbi Kristina, after all, was only famous because her mum and dad, Bobby Brown, were famous.

Yet the fame drug proved just as deadly.

Since she was finally pronounced dead after months in a coma following her own drugs-and-alcohol bath death, the same ludicrous circus has pursued this tragic 22-year-old young woman.

Here, Bobbi with her grandmother, Whitney's mother Cissy, in 2012. But where were all the family and friend when she was lying in a bath and the months and years leading up to it?

'It's not over': Fuming Leolah Brown booted from funeral

The same family members arguing with each other, the same friends and pretend friends squabbling over who knew her best, the same vile cesspit of salacious, heartless bulls**t.

Where were all these ‘caring’ people when it really mattered? When Whitney and Bobbi Kristina were lying submerged in their baths?

Or more importantly, in the weeks, months and years leading up to them lying submerged in their baths?

Now they all come crawling out of the woodwork like blood-thirsty leeches, desperate to claim their stake in the residual Houston fame game, ravenous for any dollars that may slide their way.

I don’t even know who most of these people are.

Apparently, Bobby Brown’s sister Leolah hates Whitney’s sister-in-law Pat Houston so much that she had to be ejected from their niece's funeral service for shouting abuse at her.

Why all the attention-seeking mayhem?

Simple. Leolah Brown is supposedly after her own reality TV show.

She wants to be famous.

She’s already hooked on the same drug that killed Whitney and Bobbi Kristina. A drug which once sampled is never forgotten and can never be replaced by mere anonymous normality again.

It’s pathetic.

The single best tribute that any of this family can now pay to Whitney and Bobbi Kristina is to shut the **** up.