On Monday night, a tired-looking Cissy Houston rode in a red Mercedes from New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport to the Whigham Funeral parlor in Newark, followed by a hearse containing the remains of her daughter, Whitney Houston, the New York Daily News reports. Video from The Associated Press shows the hearse backing up to the funeral home as hometown fans call out to the late diva, who died in her Beverly Hills Hotel room at age 48 on Saturday night.
A massive public funeral is planned to take place at Newark’s Prudential Center, the paper reports, possibly on Friday.
In other morbid Houston news, TMZ obtained photos of the hotel room, taken after her body was removed from the scene. One shows a table full of room service food, a can of Heineken and an empty champagne glass. It is thought that Houston died of a combination of alcohol and prescription drugs, though toxicology tests have yet to be completed.
Another photo shows a tray of food on the floor of the bathroom. But the most haunting (and maybe tasteless?) pic is of the tub where Whitney was found, still full of water, with a gravy dish said to contain olive oil — one of Whitney’s beauty secrets.
And because we don’t want to leave you with that image in your mind, here’s a slightly more lighthearted report: Canada’s Jam! Showbiz unearthed an amusing-only-in-retrospect tidbit from the memoir of a woman who reportedly lived with Osama bin Laden in 1996, Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof. In it, Boof recalls how the terrorist mastermind told her “he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston” and would talk about her all the time. “He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.” And to do that, of course, he was willing to have Houston’s then-husband Bobby Brown killed. OK, we take it back. Maybe this tidbid is just creepy and not at all amusing.
Related: Bobbi Kristina Home After “Nervous Breakdown” Following Whitney Houston’s Death
[Photos: Getty Images]
