Whitney Houston

LOS ANGELES - Coroner's officials said yesterday that they wouldn't release any information about an autopsy on singer Whitney Houston. The singer, 48, was found in the bathtub of her room Saturday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, but Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter declined to say anything about the room's condition or any evidence investigators recovered. He said that there were no obvious signs of trauma, but that officials were not ruling out any cause of death until they have toxicology results, which will take weeks to obtain.

John Houston stole the show at the first-ever Garden State Music Awards last night at the Count Basie Theater. Though he wasn't nominated for anything, he did accept seven awards - for his daughter Whitney, who wasn't present because she is on tour in Hong Kong. Her awards included best female vocalist, best album (for Whitney), and best pop single (for "So Emotional. ") "I know this was very important to Whitney because when I talked to her a few weeks ago, she made sure I would come here," John Houston said.

In her heyday, from the mid-'80s to mid-'90s, Whitney Houston was a Billboard chart-topping force whose achievements qualify her as one of the most commercially successful female solo artists of all time. On Billboard's list of the Top 10 albums by a woman that have spent the longest time atop the charts, Houston has three, more than anybody else: No. 1: The Bodyguard (1992), at the top spot for 20 weeks. No. 4: Her debut Whitney Houston (1985), at the top spot for 14 weeks.

Whitney Houston has taken a double-barreled approach in denying long- lingering rumors that she is gay. In the October issues of Life and Fame magazines, the singer suggests that the stories festered because of her close relationship with executive assistant Robyn Crawford and because she has not been publicly connected with men. In Life, to be published Monday, Houston explains that she and Crawford go back to girlhood days and "even back in our...

As the 12-steppers say, the program works if you work it. But it seems Whitney Houston ain't working it all that good. In fact, according to the New York Daily News, Her Divaness has left the safe confines of the rehab she checked into on March 15. "Whitney got extremely upset and said she felt the walls were closing in on her," a source tells the News. Houston's rep, Nancy Seltzer, is taking the Middle Path, known in the Buddhism-meets-postmodern-public-relations milieu as a non-denial denial.

LOS ANGELES - Whitney Houston was a chronic cocaine user who had the drug in her system when she drowned in a hotel bathtub, coroner's officials said Thursday after releasing autopsy findings that also noted that heart disease contributed to her death. The disclosure ended weeks of speculation about what killed the Grammy-winning singer Feb. 11, on the eve of the Grammy Awards. Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and her death was ruled accidental.

P ATRICIA CORNWELL is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, but it was the author's attorneys who worked a scalpel with surgical precision over her former financial-management firm. A federal jury Tuesday awarded Cornwell nearly $51 million in her lawsuit, claiming that Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP had been negligent in handling her finances and cost her millions. Attorneys for the firm and former principal Evan Snapper said that there was no money missing from Cornwell's accounts.

She was inspired to the music life by child star Michael Jackson . Yet when she finally had it all - fame, glory, riches - all Whitney Houston wanted to do was quit. So writes Whitney's mother, Cissy Houston , 79, in Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped , a memoir due out Tuesday about the diva known as Nippy to her family. "I remember Nippy watching television and seeing Michael Jackson doing his thing," Cissy writes.

SHOWBIZ CLICHES so old they had mold on them back in the Irene Cara era are dusted off for the remake of "Sparkle," a musical melodrama set in the golden age of girl groups. Yeah, you're allowed to think "Dreamgirls," because "Dreamgirls" came AFTER the 1976 Cara musical about sisters trying to make it in Motown. They're plowing the same ground as a century of other showbiz musicals - good kids lured away from religion and piety by the limelight's glow, stumbling into drugs, sex and abuse before trying to pull it all together for one big show.

DIGGING into a conversation with two stars of "Sparkle" - Jordin Sparks and Carmen Ejogo - is a delicate thing. The musical performances are rousing, riveting. The slick cinematography and period-perfect costumes/art direction of the shot-in-Motown film drama really take you back, evoke an era. Good reasons for a talent interviewer to be upbeat. If only . . . "Sparkle" relates the ups-'n'-downs tale of a fictionalized, sisterly singing/songwriting trio kinda like the Supremes.

The Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas Sunday night was a feast of celebrities, emotions and various degrees of clothing. The most touching moment came moments before Bobbi Kristina Brown, daughter of Whitney Houston, received an award on behalf of her late mother, who died in February. Just before the presentation, Brown began crying as singer Jordin Sparks sang the Houston megahit "I Will Always Love You. " In less poignant news, Katy Perry wore a shimmering lilac gown by Blumarine while Miley Cyrus' white, low-cut blazer and mini-mini skirt by designer Jean Paul Gaultier fell considerably above her knees.

Whitney Houston fans have maligned Bobby Brown as a bad influence on his ex-wife. But the "My Prerogative" singer says he's not to blame for the late diva's death. "It's just unexplainable how one could, you know, [say that I] got her addicted to drugs," Brown tells Matt Lauer in a chat to air Wednesday on Today. "I'm not the reason she's gone. " Brown, 43, says it was Houston who introduced him to hard drugs such as crack. Brown says he was devastated to hear Houston was still on drugs.

Michael Jackson & Whitney Houston? In a revelation unexpected, strange, and a bit crazy, Michael Jackson's bodyguard tells London's The Sun that the King of Pop had a secret, weeks-long, sexually torrid affair with Whitney Houston. Matt Fiddes says the diva and the divo, who ultimately shared a similar fate, became lovers in 1991. "Whitney practically moved into Michael's [Neverland] ranch — and they had a fling like any other young couple," says Fiddes. But, alas, Houston broke it off. "I know [Jackson]

Whitney Houston was lying face down in her bathtub of her Beverly Hilton room when she was discovered by her personal assistant on Feb. 11. This and other sometimes grisly details about the diva's death were revealed with the release of her official autopsy report by the Los Angeles Coroner's Office. Houston's cause of death remains the same: a combination of drowning, heart disease, and cocaine use. But the report suggests the cocaine, and other drugs, played a much larger part in her death.

A small quantity of white powder recovered at the Beverly Hilton hotel room in L.A. where singer Whitney Houston died has been identified as cocaine, sources tell TMZ. Cocaine and heart disease were contributing factors in her Feb. 11 accidental drowning death. Meanwhile, mom, Cissy Houston, 78, says in her first interview since the tragedy that she wishes things were different. "There's nothing I can do about it," she told MY9 TV (WWOR), a Fox affiliate in Secaucus, N.J.. "There's nothing nobody else can do about it. If I thought I could do something to bring her back, that's exactly what I'd do, but I know that's impossible.

The Iverson divorce - a strange, postmodern form of emotional musical chairs - has taken another strange zig. TMZ says Allen Iverson wants to stop - abort, annul, abrogate - divorce proceedings, sputtering on since March 2010, when estranged wife Tawanna first filed papers. In court documents cited by TMZ, the former Sixers megastar requests the court to chuck Tawanna's divorce petition because he and Tawanna revived their union between November 2011 and February 2012, proving that their marriage is not "irretrievably broken," as Tawanna claimed in 2010.