Whitney Houston’s Bodyguard Who Inspired Kevin Costner’s Role Opens Up About Their Close Friendship

Former Scotland Yard police officer David Roberts hesitated when he was asked to provide security for pop singer Whitney Houston. The real-life inspiration for Kevin Costner’s role in The Bodyguard spent most of his career looking out for the well-being of CEOs and diplomats, not performers.

“When you start thinking about working with a pop star, there are so many unknowns,” David exclusively tells Closer.

Still, he was waiting at London’s Heathrow Airport when Whitney and her entourage touched down in April of 1988.

“I was so impressed,” he says of meeting the star. “I was not expecting a shy, articulate, highly intelligent young woman with the voice of an angel.”

He shares the story of their close friendship in Protecting Whitney: The Memoir of Her Bodyguard (out January 28).

Working for Whitney at the height of her career, David protected the singer from delusional fans, stalkers and other people who wanted to harm her. There were also threats closer to home.

“My role was to help avoid people taking advantage of her generosity,” he explains. “She was too generous. People waited until we were on tour to get married because Whitney would pay for everything. She was generous with her heart, her money and her love for everyone. It didn’t serve her well.”

Whitney’s own wedding to R&B singer Bobby Brown in 1992 made David’s job a lot harder. A whopping 24 trespassers tried to scale the fence surrounding Whitney’s estate in New Jersey during the event. Meanwhile, David’s relationship with Bobby was always rocky.

“Mr. Brown sort of tolerated me because Whitney wanted him to,” says David. “She liked the way I looked after her and he loved her. But we were very different people.”

While working with Whitney, David never saw her use drugs or drink excessive alcohol.

“In my presence, never did I see her take or imbibe any drug beyond a cigarette or a bottle of Heineken. That was her drug,” he says, but eventually stories drifted down to him.

In the book, David writes about how Whitney overdosed in 1995 on the set of Waiting to Exhale. After her doctor warned that she risked losing her singing voice if she continued to be reckless with her health, David wrote a letter to her lawyers revealing that members of Whitney’s entourage were giving her drugs.

A week later, he was fired.

“I think our last conversation was in Singapore,” David says. “We were on our way back to the United States, and it was a normal conversation.”

He never got a chance to say goodbye.

“Metaphorically speaking, I took that bullet. I put my association on the line and I lost. For that failure, I will always feel I let her down.”

David was sitting at his desk in 2012 when he heard the news of Whitney’s death at age 48 from an accidental drowning.

“I had been angry since 1995,” he admits, adding that writing his memoir helped him reconcile the past. “She should still be here. We should be sitting here listening to her music today.”

He prefers to think about the good times.

“Whitney was happiest when she was having fun with her family,” he says. “Out of the public eye, when we were sitting together in a corridor in a hotel anywhere in the world, that’s when we had fun.”

One of the few mementos he kept is an autographed invitation Whitney sent him to her birthday party in 1989.

“It says, ‘David, I will always love you,’” he says. “Wasn’t that poetic? That’s all I ever needed.”