Bobbi Brown death latest chapter in Hollywood’s dark legacy that includes children of Bing Crosby and Paul Newman

THE death of Bobbi Kristina Brown adds another sad chapter to one of Hollywood’s darkest stories but Whitney Houston’s is not the first celebrity family haunted by tragedy.

TALENT and tragedy apparently stalk some families. The tragic death of Bobbi Kristina Brown, six months after she was found unconscious in similar circumstances to those that claimed the life of her mother Whitney Houston, adds another chapter.

Brown’s father is R&B singer Bobby Brown, her maternal aunt is Dionne Warwick and her grandmother Cissy Houston was a back-up singer for Elvis Presley.

But addiction runs alongside their prodigious talent: Whitney and her older brothers dabbled in drugs as teenagers; Warwick, a generous charity donor, also admitted she loved to shop and in 2013 declared herself bankrupt, while Brown lists multiple arrests for drug and ­alcohol abuse.

Singers Cissy Houston and daughter Whitney in 2010.

Bobbi Kristina Brown never recovered from the death of her mother. Picture: AFP

With a history of violence and drug abuse since her early teens, Bobbi, 22, was found face down in her bathtub in her Atlanta, Georgia home on January 31. Her mother was found face down in a bathtub in a Los Angeles hotel on February 11, 2012, aged 48, on the eve of the Grammy Awards.

BOBBY BROWN NUMB AFTER DAUGHTER’S DEATH

BOBBI KRISTINA BROWN’S TROUBLED LIFE

Cissy later discussed her daughter’s tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with Brown: “My baby tried,” she said. “She did. She just had the wrong partner, you know?”

Appearing on stage with her parents from infancy, Bobbi reportedly wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

Dana Plato with “Different Strokes” co-stars Gary Coleman, Conrad Bain and Todd Bridges.

LIKE MOTHER LIKE SON

Her story has echoes of the early death of Diff’rent Strokes actor Dana Plato, whose character Kimberly Drummond was written off the hit show in 1984. Plato overdosed on prescription pain killers in 1999, when her son Tyler Lambert was 14. Tyler, whose father was rock musician Lanny Lambert, hoped to follow his mother into show business but also began experimenting with drugs. He died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head in 2010, aged 25, two days before the 11th anniversary of his mother’s death.

Plato’s former manager Johnny Whitaker said he had tried to intervene in Lambert’s drug use.

“I did say, ‘You know your mother had a problem, which means you may have a problem because it is a family disease’,” Whitaker said.

Jeff Buckley struggled with his father’s fame.

Tim Buckley died in 1975.

THE FATHER HE MET ONCE

Tragedy also followed Californian musician Tim Buckley who died in 1975 from a heroin overdose at 28, leaving nine albums. His son Jeff, who met his father just once to spend a week with him at age eight, died at 30, in 1997. He had waded into an eddy on the Mississippi River, fully dressed and still wearing his boots, and apparently drowned in the wake of a speedboat. A coroner’s report found Jeff was drug and alcohol free when his body was found one week later.

A friend later told Rolling Stone magazine that just after his 30th birthday, young Buckley was “pretty upset, pretty shaky, and, ‘I just want to be as good as my father’.”

SAD TRUTH OF LIFE WITH BING

Singer Gary Crosby married Barbara Stuart at the Hotel Flamingo, Las Vegas, 06/09/60. UPI pic. Family

Decades earlier, as Bing Crosby sold 300 million records and won acclaim from LIFE magazine as “incontestably the No. 1 Big Family Man of Hollywood”, for the eldest of his seven children Christmas was more often black-and-blue than white.

Crosby had four sons with first wife Dixie Lee (Wilma Wyatt), a promising 19-year-old actor-singer when they married. Their first son Gary, named for actor Gary Cooper, was born in 1933, followed by twins Philip and Dennis in 1934, and Lindsay in 1938. Dixie died in 1952.

Bing encouraged his sons into show business and they performed in night clubs and on his television programs as the Crosby Boys. But after Bing’s death in 1977, when his money was left in a blind trust which his sons could not touch until age 65, Gary described both his parents as harsh and abusive disciplinarians in a 1983 memoir, Going My Own Way.

Youngest son Lindsay, who had his first breakdown in 1962, committed suicide in December 1989, apparently after watching White Christmas on TV. He had told relatives he could not forget beatings inflicted by his father during family Christmas holidays at his father’s ranch. Dennis, who recounted that “Gary got the first licking, and we got the second”, killed himself two years later. Both had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.

Paul Newman in “The Color of Money”. Picture: AP

Scott Newman struggled with his father’s success.

PUSHED ASIDE BY FANS

For the Newman family, dad Paul’s easygoing charm translated into distant reserve, especially for the three children from his first marriage to Jackie Witte. Second wife Joanne Woodward said public adoration of their father was devastating for all six of his children.

“When the kids go anywhere with him,” she said, “they can be pushed aside by fans, as if they don’t count, as if they’re nothing in themselves.”

The pressures of a showbiz home were too much for Newman’s first born, and only son, Scott. Prone to tantrums as a boy, Newman jokingly referred to him as “Mad Scott”. Although Scott grew taller and bigger than his father, all the girls he knew fancied his father more.

After dabbling in drugs, run-ins with police and a serious motor cycle accident, Scott took a fatal dose of valium with alcohol and other drugs in November 1978. He was 28.

Describing Scott’s death as “the saddest day of my life”, Newman reflected that “when they were growing up I wasn’t there much, and when I was there I was very inconsistent with them. It was hard for them to get a balance’’.

Cheyenne Brando and her actor father Marlon at a bail hearing in Los Angeles for Christian Brando, after he shot dead’s Cheyenne’s lover.

BRANDO’S TURMOIL SPANNED GENERATIONS

ACTOR Marlon Brando survived a tortured childhood with an alcoholic mother and abusive father to win cinematic acclaim. But success was stained by a tumultuous personal life with three wives, several girlfriends and at least 11 children, three of whom were adopted.

Brando’s third marriage was to Tahitian actor Tarita Teriipaia, then 20, his love interest in Mutiny On The Bounty. Their second child, daughter Tarita Cheyenne, was born in 1970. In 1990, his eldest son Christian, from his first marriage, shot dead Cheyenne’s lover Dag Drollet, father of her unborn child. Already psychiatrically unstable, in 1995 Cheyenne, a former model, hanged herself. Neither her father or eldest stepbrother Christian attended her funeral.

Originally published as Bobbi Brown death latest chapter in Hollywood’s dark legacy that includes children of Bing Crosby and Paul Newman